This article examines how people gathered and transmitted political information in Colombia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on the study of the press in Colombia and Latin America. However, few historians have explored other forms of information, such as telegrams, rumours and letters, or how Colombians combined these. By focusing on how various forms of information circulated through political, familial and commercial networks, this study offers a new dimension to our understanding of communications in Colombia. It argues that this was a period of increasing circulation of information due to social, political and economic change, as well as new links between oral and written practices. Thus, this article illuminates how Colombians circulated political information in a society of restricted literacy in post-colonial Latin America, offering new insights into politics, communications and the interplay between written and oral culture.

This article probes the racially conflictual plotlines of mamulengo, a form of improvised popular puppetry in North-East Brazil. Drawing on a corpus of transcribed shows performed between the 1940s and 1970s, it shows how audacious Black protagonists – often named Baltazar or Benedito – took part in a game of racial ‘acrobatics’. By playing the roles of fools (bobos) and aggressors (desordeiros), these heroes simultaneously reproduced a racist status quo and offered a spirited and violent resistance to its abuses. While mamulengo has never been brought to bear on discussions of race in Brazil, this oft-overlooked form of cultural expression forces us to confront the uncomfortable aspects of race-making and belonging as they are elaborated ‘from below’.

On 4 June 1943, a military coup crushed Argentina's democracy, marking the end of the oligarchic era and ‘planting the seeds’ of Peronism. This case sheds light on how rulers’ mistakes can operate as a key independent variable in producing regime changes. We argue that the former conservative president, Ramón S. Castillo, provoked an otherwise avoidable democratic breakdown. Specifically, Castillo's misguided relationships with regime insiders and outsiders unintentionally eroded political stability and triggered the fall of democracy. Until now, agent-based scholarship has fallen short in tracing incumbents’ mistakes and linking them to regime-change processes. We test the argument by conducting a within-case analysis of Argentina's democratic fall in the early 1940s, scrutinising the president's errors at five critical events. We conclude that critical-event analysis can help disentangle the role of leaders’ mistakes in other episodes of regime change.

In May 1954, the story broke internationally of Marta Olmos, recipient of the first widely known, male-to-female sex reassignment conducted in Mexico. Her doctor, Rafael Sandoval Camacho, claimed that homosexuality could be cured and that, through transitions, queer Mexicans could be made into ‘socially useful’ citizens. While initially celebrated as a scientific triumph placing Mexico among elite nations, and receiving support from individuals close to the Ruiz Cortines administration, opinions soured as critics – physicians, politicians, cartoonists and clerics – condemned Marta for renouncing manhood through a fraudulent cure that threatened the binary sex/gender order underpinning Mexican nationalism. Sex reassignment, understood through foreigners including Christine Jorgensen and associated with ‘anti-social’ queer Mexicans, thus exemplified misplaced priorities during a period in which the state sought to ‘modernise patriarchy’. While self-affirming for Marta and permitted unofficially through state indifference, sex reassignment became seen as anti-Mexican. Thus, Marta's case illuminated how the state reconciled development with policing its patriarchal order.

The Brazilian military has recently executed an unexpected return to politics by engaging more actively in domestic policymaking and implementation both before and during the Bolsonaro government, thus jeopardising democratic consolidation. To help understand this development, we examine why the military openly challenges civilian authority over some issues, while remaining silent on others. Whereas prior work emphasises external factors like civilians’ threats to military prerogatives, we argue that contestation of civilian authority stems in no small part from internal military conflict over how to utilise power. The military uses contestation to coordinate prerogatives with civilians and to communicate within the armed forces to increase cohesion. We illustrate this argument with case studies of military contestation surrounding political leadership selection and internal security, using the Army Commander's discourse via Twitter posts and public statements, plus key informant interviews and military publications.

Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political economy of violence in order to reveal the profoundly misleading nature of this prevalent view. In particular, it highlights how Nicaragua is governed through a particular political ‘settlement’ underpinned by drug trafficking, police and judicial corruption, as well as ‘mafia state’ governance. These factors have coalesced to establish a highly efficient and engrained ‘narco-state’ whose undoing is unlikely in the short term.